(ORDO NEWS) — The Hubble telescope looked beyond the Milky Way and found a unique shield protecting dwarf galaxies.
The Hubble telescope, which has been a source of unique discoveries in deep space for more than three decades, has discovered another amazing feature, this time outside of our galaxy.
A flying observatory has discovered a corona, a kind of protective shield of hot overloaded gas, around the Magellanic system outside the Milky Way , which protects the dwarf galaxy from destruction.
The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are satellite galaxies of the Milky Way, where new stars form, and because they are attracted to our galaxy, they can be destroyed by gravity.
However, they remain unharmed. This feature has always puzzled astronomers, who have wondered: why does it remain untouched despite such intense star formation activity?
“Many scientists have tried to explain how these flows of material could have ended up there.
If the gas has been removed from these galaxies, how are they still forming stars, wonders Dhanesh Krishnarao, an assistant professor at Colorado College, who led the study.
The discovery, published in Nature, points to the presence of a kind of protective shield that prevents the Milky Way from absorbing gas from satellite galaxies, allowing them to form new stars.
Astrophysicist Andrew Fox of the Space Telescope Science Institute said: “Galaxies wrap themselves in gaseous cocoons that act as protective shields from other galaxies.
Although such a shield was speculated many years ago, this discovery is the first evidence of such a phenomenon in deep space.”
Astronomers were surprised to find that although this shield spans almost 100,000 light-years, it is invisible. To detect it, astronomers had to study archival observational data over the past 30 years.
Scientists suggest that this corona is the remnant of a primordial gas cloud that collapsed billions of years ago to form a galaxy.
“Anything that tries to enter the galaxy must first pass through this material so that it can absorb some of this impact.
The corona protects the gas that is inside the galaxy itself and is forming new stars,” explained Krishnarao.
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